Bus Protesters Target 'Evil' Google Employee at Home

Anti-Google activists in the Bay Area took things up a notch this week, targeting one of the company's employees at home.

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Anti-Google activists in the Bay Area took things up a notch this week, targeting one of the company's employees at home.

A group of protestors calling themselves Counterforce on Tuesday morning showed up at the Berkeley, Calif. home of Google X developer Anthony Levandowski, best known as the engineer behind the tech giant's famous self-driving car, and attempted to prevent him from getting to work. In a statement posted the local news site Indybay, the protestors said they arrived at Levandowski's door around 7 a.m. and held up banners reading "Google's Future Stops Here" before distributing fliers about him around the neighborhood.

"Anthony Levandowski is building an unconscionable world of surveillance, control and automation," the flier (pictured above) reads. "He is your neighbor." The fliers called Levandowski evil, and detailed his work in the defense industry as well as his purported plans to develop luxury condos in the area.

"Our problem is with Google, its pervasive surveillance capabilities utilized by the NSA, the technologies it is developing, and the gentrification its employees are causing in every city they inhabit," the group said. "But our problem does not stop with Google. All of you other tech companies, all of you other developers and everyone else building the new surveillance state — We're coming for you next."

After putting up fliers around Levandowski's neighborhood and blocking his driveway for about 45 minutes, the protestors made their way to a Google shuttle pickup in Berkeley and blocked it for around 30 minutes.

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the incident.

The protest came as the San Francisco transit agency voted Tuesday to oversee tech companies like Google, Apple, and Facebook who shuttle workers in luxury, Wi-Fi-enabled buses from San Francisco to Silicon Valley, according to The New York Times. The buses have sparked a heated debate, with activists arguing that companies should be fined for picking up employees at city bus stops without paying taxes and disrupting San Francisco public transportation.

Under the new pilot program approved this week, buses will be charged $1 each time they pick up or drop off passengers.

Angela has been a PCMag reporter since January 2012. Prior to joining the team, she worked as a reporter for SC Magazine, covering everything related to hackers and computer security. Angela has also written for The Northern Valley Suburbanite in New Jersey, The Dominion Post in West Virginia, and the Uniontown-Herald Standard in Pennsylvania. She is a graduate of West Virginia University's Perely Isaac Reed School of Journalism.
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